Entrepreneurial Passion and the Myth of Breaking Free from Underdevelopment Cycle: The Case of Pakistan

Abstract

The successes in entrepreneurial domain attained by efficiency and innovation driven economies
in past few decades witnessed the surge of structured entrepreneurial efforts at government and higher education levels in efficiency and factor driven economies. Factor driven economies are
still struggling to create a viable ecology for promotion of entrepreneurial culture and motivate the
young generations to indulge in entrepreneurial activity. Individual personality traits have been
extensively studied to come up with a policy to induce entrepreneurial culture in the society but
these policies seem to have ignored factors affecting entrepreneurial passion. The present study is
an effort to understand the entrepreneurial passion in the context of harmonious and obsessive
passions, and tried to understand the entrepreneurial inclination of youth living in rural areas of
Pakistan for indulgence in agricultural based innovations. The respondents represented the four
sub-sectors of agriculture (i.e. Crop Production, Agricultural Marketing, Livestock, and
Agricultural Engineering). The final results were based on the questionnaire modified due to
results of the confirmatory and exploratory factors analysis, and also the invariance between the
four sub-samples. The results show that harmonious passion dominates in agriculture based
entrepreneurs in contrast with obsessive passion. This clearly indicated that the passion to indulge
in entrepreneurial activity in Pakistan is need driven and not built inherently in the personality.That is why the new business creation is either imitation or with low level of innovation. The study
proposes that the policies of governments must focus on inculcating the spirit of newness and
innovation at early education level. Once it is achieved the growing generations will themselves
indulge in entrepreneurial activity when they reach the university and incubators there will further
cater for their growth into practical and professional structures.